Guiding Your Child To Excellence

How to help your child to get motivated, manage stress

and excel in exams

A Note To Parents

Let’s start with the important news: as a parent, you matter. In our 17 years of research into student performance, students consistently report that their parents play a critical role and impact their results. Knowing this, the question is, what is the best way to support your child? How do you walk the fine line between supporting your child versus becoming the enemy? While all parents want to help their child succeed, knowing exactly how to do this can be downright confusing. This eBook is our attempt to help remove the confusion. Running workshops with students in over 2000 schools each year has given us the opportunity to deeply understand them. We have come to learn what motivates students, what helps them to focus, and how top students navigate the stresses and challenges of high school. In this eBook you will find a self-assessment tool that helps you identify your potential areas of concern, followed by a series of tips to help you overcome them. It also points you in the direction of other resources to help you guide your child to excellence. Let’s make this a conversation. We would love to hear your challenges and questions, and equally, your successes as a parent. Feel free to Tweet us at @elevateed, or reach us on Facebook or on our parent blog and let us know about your experiences. We’ll do our best to share and spread the inside secrets that have worked for families before.

Douglas Barton Global ChairmanELEVATE EDUCATION

How Engaged Is Your Child?

My child is motivated to study/do homework

My child sits down to work without my need to intervene, cajole or bribe them

I have a firm understanding of how much work my child is set & how much they should be doing

I am confident that my child self-regulates their technology use to make time for school work

My child’s study environment is set up to be free from distractions such as phones, social media and other digital notifications

My child refuses to study with TV or music on in the background

I have no concerns about my child’s stress and anxiety levels

My child keeps a healthy balance between school, study, extra curricular activities and social life

My child’s marks do not affect her/his self-esteem, confidence and/or motivation

STRONGLY DISAGREE agree

disagree STRONGLY AGREE

Motivation

Technology

Stress

See Your Results

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Tally Your Self Assessment

Keep this a secret! Your child is motivated! Don’t brag, let alone discuss with other parents unless you want to be ostracised! Keep going, relax and just make sure they are taking regular breaks – see ‘worry #6’.

Your child is an oscillator. The good news is, the majority of the time they are motivated. The bad news is that sometimes they hit a valley as well. See the next page to help them self-motivate across the year.

Your child is a flat liner! Don’t worry! Every student can get motivated – see’worry #1’..

12 - 11Motivation

Your child has the self-discipline of a reclusive monk! Well done – take credit! Just make sure they don’t take it too far. See ‘worry #6’.

A bit of extra work and your child has the discipline of a marine. See the next 2 pages for some simple changes you can help them make to get them to the next level and improve their productivity.

It’s no surprise. Facebook has 10,000 staff members dedicated solely to ensuring your child is distracted. The good news is that you can wean them off! See tips #3 and #4 to help wean them off distractions.

Technology

10 - 8 7 - 3

Where is your child? The Bahamas? They are chilled out. Maybe too chilled out? See the following page on goal setting to see if they need a kick of motivation to get them moving!

They are a master in training. Some small changes, and you have a self-directed study weapon on your hands. Read on and select at will the secrets to take your child to the next level.

Good news is your child is normal! Study isn’t easy, intuitive or natural for most people. The good news is success at school is driven by adopting simple habits. They are easy and can be used by 99% of students. Read on to find out what they are.

Stress

Your Totals

STUDENT COACHING

Want to know how your child’s study habits

compare to those of top students?

Through a FREE 70-minute diagnostic assessment, our coach identifies the

habits that are holding your child back and develops a customised

curriculum to help your child:

Process informationTake brilliant notesManage their time

Memorise informationManage stress

Ace their exams

Claim Your FREE Diagnostic Consultation:

CALL 1300 667 945EMAIL info.aus@elevateeducation.comVISIT elevateeducation.com/coaching

Normal Responses To Motivation

Issuing rewards and punishments is the traditional approach to motivating and changing behaviour. If you want someone to continue a behaviour, reward them. If you want someone to change a behaviour, punish them. Unfortunately, when it comes to motivating students to study, this approach is only effective in the short term. It goes without saying that we know punishment, nagging and grounding rarely, if ever, get your child to study. What about bribery on the other hand? Rewards like a new phone or video game sound much more attractive, however research has shown that external rewards actually diminish a student’s motivation over the long-term. Good news right? That should save you a bit of money!

How You Can Avoid It

Research has shown that we need to identify the ‘intrinsic’ or internal motivators of thechild. That is to say, motivation is not an input - it is a consequence. We need to helpstudents pursue a genuine long-term goal. There are 3 ways you can createmeaningful rewards:

How To Help Your Child Get Motivated

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SHORT TERM GOALSAlmost all studies around goal-setting show short-term goals give students a sense of purpose, and a reason to do the work. Discuss with your child what mark they are aiming for on the next assignment or exam. Even better put it on the wall or somewhere visible.

LEVELLING-UPLevelling-up: This is how computer game designers keep your kids glued to their devices; the sense of getting better at something, and moving onto the next level. Once you have set the short-term goal once, set it again – this time make it higher!

LONG TERM GOALSLong-term goals: These will ultimately be career based. These conversations typically go like this: what are you passionate about > what qualifications do you need for this career > where do you get them > what are the entrance requirements.

For more information on goal setting, click here to read our blog post:

IS YOUR CHILD MOTIVATED?

Normal Responses To Time Management

This is probably all too common: you attend an event at the school where they talk about the increased workload and exams coming up for your child. You get home and walk into the living room only to find your child sitting there watching TV.

You ask what they are doing, only to be told: “I don’t have any work!”.

Your immediate thought is “that’s not what I’ve been told”, and an argument ensues.

The odds are that you are correct and they do indeed have work. However, there is also the possibility that they were just on an innocent study break. In moments like these the natural response is to argue, prod, nag or fight.

We all know what happens next; they don’t end up doing any work, and you become enemy #1.

Our Recommendation:

Develop a shared understanding of when your child is meant to be working and when they are setting aside time to take a break.

Do this by creating a study timetable cooperatively. This is such a critical exercise that in our private work with families, our study coaches spend approximately 55 minutes with the student co-designing a customised study planner and timetable to suit the child’s lifestyle. This document then becomes central to helping parents understand their child’s study plans and volume.

Getting Your Child To Actually Sit Down And Work

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For more information on how to make a

study timetable with your child, check out

our TEDx TALK or head to our blog post on MAKING A STUDY

TIMETABLE WITH YOUR CHILD

Example Timetable

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Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday

4pm

5pm

6pm

7pm

8pm

9pm

10pm

11pm

12am

Saturday Sunday

8am

9am

10am

11am

12pm

1pm

2pm

3pm

4pm

5pm

6pm

7pm

8pm

9pm

10pm

11pm

For a digital and editable version of the timetable that

you can fill in online, CLICK HERE

Normal Responses To Avoiding Technological Distractions

Let’s just start by saying that everything you have thought is correct. Your instincts are right. Digital distractions drain productivity and severely impact the ability to memorise information. Put simply, any drain on attention is a drain on marks.

Understandably, most parents feel powerless to control the allure of social media, smart phone apps, games, and everything in between. In our experience, parents adopt 1 of 2 polarised reactions: fight or flight.

The first approach is to demonise technology and banish its use. We’ve seen everything from removing SIM cards, locking phones away in drawers or instituting blanket complete technology bans.

In contrast, many parents surrender and simply ignore the problem, which leaves their child with unrestricted access to a world of distraction. The problem here is the lack of balance. On the one hand the parent severely restricts the child’s window to the world and connection to other kids, and on the other, they leave the flood gates wide open meaning that their child has very little chance of getting any work done.

Our Recommendation

Empower your child to self-regulate. Rather than creating blanket bans on smartphone use, it can be helpful create a separation between ‘high powered’ and ‘low powered’ work.

We define high powered as the type of study that relates directly to exam preparation; memorising information for a test or completing past exam papers/practise essays. This is the type of work that should be distraction free so that technological interruptions do not disrupt the learning process. Low powered work on the other hand, may be regular homework tasks or reviewing their notes from the day. This work is still important, but is less vulnerable to being ruined by the sound of a notification or A buzzing phone.

If all else fails, there are some great apps that help a student to block our distracting social media or websites such as YouTube for designated study periods.

Using Technology To Beat Technological Distractions

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For more information on helpful apps and programs, check out our blog post on:18 APPS THAT HELP STUDENTS

Normal Response To Study Environment

Parents share a common desire to encourage their child to work at the dinner table or in a common space where they can be seen and helped. There’s a tendency to get your child to study under any circumstances and therefore it’s convenient to encourage them to bring their notes to the TV and sit on the couch revising. The problem is that none of the scenarios mentioned above are conducive to focus. They all involve some form of distraction or the capacity to lose focus.

Our Recommendation:

We encourage parents to set up a space that maximises attention. The research shows that it is much more effective to separate study from the rest of life. The first thing you should do is find a space in which studying is removed from the hustle and bustle of life at home. It might be your child’s bedroom, a separate study if you have one, or simply a room as far away from the TV and noisy siblings as possible.

Set up a space for your child that has a desk, is quiet, and is removed from others in the home. This simple change will ritualise the study process and help to keep your child focused and on task. In fact, our coaching client ‘Ivy’ reported that after shifting her study environment from the living room to her bedroom desk, she was able to work for an extra 2 hours per night due to her increased focus and lack of distraction from siblings. Small changes like this can lead to a sharp increase in productivity.

Blocking Distractions By Controlling The Environment

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Normal Responses To Test Results

“Mum I got 95% on my last test!” This is obviously great news. The obvious response is to tell them “well done” and congratulate them, possibly using the opportunity to reinforce just how smart your child is.

Research by educational psychologist, Carol Dweck, has identified that praising outcomes (the grades) instead of the process (what we did to achieve those grades) can lead to students adopting a fixed mindset.

“Fixed mindset” students come to believe that their success is caused by personal characteristics such as IQ. This both limits the amount of work they put in (after all, their IQ assures them of a good result) but even worse limits their resilience when they do badly, because in these cases their lack of success is rationalised by their IQ – i.e. I didn’t do well because I simply am not smart enough.

Working with over a million students every year, we’ve noticed that a core limitation to their success has been their adoption of a fixed mindset.

What We Recommend

As a parent, it is more productive for you to praise process, rather than outcome. The process or approach used by your child is something that they can change and refine with feedback. Once they receive a test score, they cannot go back and change the test result – it’s done. The test result is a product of the work they have put in and the process they have adopted.

Therefore, while you can still praise your child for receiving a good result on their exams, relating the praise back to the process they adopted will be more productive and will reinforce the right behaviour; the preparation. Praise the hard work. “You deserved that result, because you worked so hard”, or “that’s great work because I know you changed the way you prepared for the exam. It’s so great to see all the effort paying off.”

Similarly, if your child receives a low mark on an exam, the same approach should be adopted. Asking them about their process, both in preparation and in the exam room will depersonalise the results and remove the emotional sting. A poor result is a product of poor preparation – nothing more, nothing less. By instilling this message, it focuses the student to think about how they can change their approach, rather than blaming any internal or innate characteristics.

Build Resilience By Praising Process, Not Outcome

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For more information head to our blog

post on HELPING YOUR CHILD MANAGE

STRESS

Typical Responses To Stress

One of the messages that your child will most likely hear over and over again this year is that this is one of the most important years in their life. This comes with daunting expectations. It means that your child will need to put in more effort than ever before and that the demands on their time and energy will be higher.

The natural next step is to consider which parts of your child’s hobbies and activities should be shelved or deprioritised. While compromise is expected, quite often we find that parents’ expectations about what should be removed often go too far and are out of step with commitments that top students maintain.

Our Recommendation:

In our work with top performing students, most of them carried out rich and varied lifestyles where they had social, sporting and other commitments. It became clear from our research that the top students were happy students who devoted a sizeable proportion of their time to non-study tasks.

In these cases the time taken out from study was critical in helping students rejuvenate and to get back to their study. This means that letting them commit to playing a sport a few times a week, seeing friends on weekends and having other hobbies will be good for their mental health and their focus.

In fact, we’ve found that when students have less time to study, they become more organised out of necessity.

Beating Stress Through Balance

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Visit our knowledge centre for more detailed information and research on how you can help your child.

Parent ResourcesReceive up to date tips when you need them. Exam preparation packs, time management hacks and more.

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